RAIRU AND THE STAR MAIDEN
ERHAPS my friend Pedro of Brazil told me the story of Rairu and the Star Maiden for much the same reason that hungry men fall to talk of meals that they have eaten. When I say hungry men I do not mean men with an appetite, but men who have long been on the verge of starvation—shipwrecked sailors, men lost in the desert, and such like. The truth is that what the heart hungers for, the tongue talks of. So my friend Pedro told me many tales of his own warm land where spice-laden breezes blow gently soft, and at the time he told me his tales we two were in the midst of the snows of Tierra del Fuego, when the winds shrieked like a thousand demons and the frost-giant had bound river and lake.
We were gold digging on the upper Santa Maria and there came without warning a fierce blizzard, the snow falling for the best part of two days and two nights, and in the morning we could not move from our tent, though we had pitched it in a quiet nook of the hills. We had little to eat, nothing to read, and no light but the fire-glow, and the world seemed to narrow about us, the mountains to close in and the leaden sky to drop. And all the while Pedro talked of his gentler land, telling me the glory of hills all purple and green, of sunlit waters and flower-crowned children. So, soon we forgot the black south wind and the destroying cold. Pedro half forgot, I think, that hope which led him to the Far South; it was a hope long cherished, that he might find gold enough to enable him to live in quiet in his own land among the books that he loved.
However, you may think this wearisome talk, judging it better that I tell the tale told by Pedro. But I have felt it best to set it down as I have, because Pedro never saw his own land again; so the writing of the story is in some measure done in affection for my friend. As soon as the snow ceased to fall he went away on foot, our horses having wandered before the storm, and his intention was to win his way to a shack some eight miles away where he might get some food which we needed sorely enough. I in the meantime, we agreed, would take my rifle and try to shoot a huanaco or some other thing. But another storm came on and it was not until five days had passed in search that I found Pedro. And he was frozen.
As I write I see the scene again—the snow-swept hills, the gray sky, the white-laden bushes, and Pedro. I made what haste I could to bury him in the ice-bound earth and put up a rough cross to mark the place, and I had barely finished when a white storm swept up and hid both mound and cross.
Here is the tale he told, one of many, and he said that he had heard it often and often when he was a child.